26 women missing from two shelter homes in UP’s Pratapgarh

The district magistrate said a team was constituted to inquire into the anomalies at the women shelters in Pratapgarh.

At least 26 women were found missing from two women’s shelter homes run by NGOs in Pratapgarh, 70 km north of Allahabad during a surprise inspection by the district magistrate on Wednesday, officials said.

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The inspection was part of a statewide crackdown in Uttar Pradesh following the rescue of 24 girls from a shelter in Deoria on Sunday after one of the girls escaped and alerted the police about the alleged sexual exploitation at the facility.

“A team was constituted to inquire into the anomalies at the women’s shelters,” district magistrate Shambhu Kumar.

A team headed by the DM first inspected a women’s shelter at Achalpur. The shelter’s records showed 15 women registered in the documents, but 12 of them were not present there.

The shelter’s superintendent Neha Praveen claimed that all women had gone for work. The shelter authorities failed to provide the account register and it did not have CCTV cameras which are mandatory.

The manager Rama Mishra told the team that the women had gone out for some private work, officials said. The register at the shelter had no photographs of the residents which is a basic requirement.

Both the shelters are expected to face action if the number of women mentioned in their registers do not tally during another round of inspection.

The Deoria scandal exposed the loopholes that allowed the couple who ran it to exploit the girls at the facility. Following the rescue of the girls from the shelter, the government ordered district magistrates to inspect and survey similar homes across 75 districts in the state.